[iwar] [fc:Crisis.Exposes.Military,.Civilian.Divide]

From: Fred Cohen (fc@all.net)
Date: 2001-10-17 06:46:53
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From: Fred Cohen <fc@all.net>
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USA Today
October 17, 2001
Crisis Exposes Military, Civilian Divide
By Philip Meyer 
Here is a sharp and troubling contrast: The preparation of the U.S. military
to fight a sustained war against terrorism is encouraging. The preparation
of our media to keep Americans informed about the conflict is not.
This problem was painfully obvious in the Persian Gulf War, and afterward,
thoughtful plans were proposed to correct it. But nothing was done.
The gap goes far beyond a simple reporter-source conflict to a rift between
military and civilian society. It has two components.
One is simple competence. Because the draft ended in 1973, very few
journalists today have served in the military. The old adage that a good
reporter is good anywhere doesn't apply in the complexities of the modern
world. It's hard to make sense of an operation if you think a Navy captain
and an Army captain have the same rank.
When the balloon goes up (military jargon for a war starting), publishers
and broadcasters face a painful choice. According to Professor Cori Dauber
of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, who served on the
Defense Department's advisory council on women in the armed services, the
Pentagon beat reporters generally have the necessary expertise. But if they
are sent to cover far-away action, their organizations don't have enough
depth to replace them with people having equal understanding and access to
Washington sources.
After the Gulf War, representatives from several news organizations met with
high-ranking officers in the Department of Defense and negotiated some ways
to avoid a variety of problems in the future.
One agreement was especially straightforward: "News organizations will make
their best efforts to assign experienced journalists to combat operations
and to make them familiar with U.S. military operations." That means special
training.
But the ad hoc chairman of that journalists' group, Clark Hoyt of Knight
Ridder, acknowledges today that nothing centrally organized or sustained has
happened to meet that goal.
The other gap is social and political, and it can make journalists, whose
business is discovering conflict, much more sympathetic to knee-jerk
pacifists than their numbers justify.
This social-political gap is not confined to journalists. A larger pattern
of distance between military elites and their civilian counterparts has been
documented by social scientists, including Professor Ole Holsti of Duke
University, in a series of surveys over a period of years. The top brass is
more socially conservative, more Republican and more likely to believe that
a decline in traditional moral values threatens the breakdown of our
society.
There was no such divide in World War II because nearly everyone served. One
of the unplanned consequences of the military draft was a great leveling
effect, where social-class distinctions were set aside. After the war, Harry
Truman and Dwight Eisenhower wanted to preserve that benefit and maintain
national security with a system of universal military training in which
every qualified man between the ages of 18 and 20 would give 1 year to his
country in peacetime.
In a message to Congress in October 1945, Truman provided a prescient
justification for his proposal. "I pointed out," he recalled in his memoirs,
"that the latent strength of our untrained citizenry was no longer
sufficient protection, and that if the attack should come again, as it did
at Pearl Harbor, we could never again count on the luxury of time to arm
ourselves and strike back.
"Our geographic security was gone - gone with the advent of the atomic bomb,
the rocket and modern airborne armies."
Congress, intent on demobilization, was not interested, and the proposal
died. But if, as now seems possible, attacks on our homeland are to become a
permanent part of life, Truman's idea makes more sense than ever. He
conceived it as including more than military training. Today, we would
include women and add such specialties as emergency medical service,
firefighting, communication and civil defense to the training.
Such a system would close more than the gap between journalists and the
military. Today, there are few veterans of military service in Congress. In
the 1970s, veterans were a large majority in Congress, and their proportion
was greater than their presence in the population. Now, according to
Pennsylvania State Professor William T. Bianco and Air Force Lt. Jamie
Markham, they are a minority, and the proportion of male members of Congress
who are veterans is less than in the population as a whole.
Their explanation, in Soldiers and Civilians: The Civil-Military Gap and
American National Security, a collection of essays published this year that
also includes Holsti's work, is that loopholes in the Vietnam draft,
followed by the all-volunteer military, created a social-class difference
between servicemen and civilians. Veterans now come from a class that's less
likely to make it to Congress.
A system of universal training - military, civil-defense or related skills
that could be called into use on short notice to combat terrorism - would
reduce both of those gaps and make the USA more democratic and, at the same
time, a safer place to live.
The Swiss discovered the benefits of universal service centuries ago, and
the Israelis copied them with notable success. If the terrorist threat
continues, it should be our turn to try universal service.
Philip Meyer, who holds the Knight Chair in Journalism at the University of
North Carolina at Chapel Hill, served for 13 years in the Naval reserve,
including a 1952-1954 tour of active duty. He is a member of USA TODAY's
board of contributors.

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